Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

Before Gabrielle Hamilton opened her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, she spent twenty fierce, hard-living years trying to find purpose and meaning in her life. Above all she sought family, particularly the thrill and the magnificence of the one from her childhood that, in her adult years, eluded her. Hamilton’s ease and comfort in a kitchen were instilled in her at an early age when her parents hosted grand parties, often for more than one hundred friends and neighbors.

13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

Growing up in the suburban hell of Misery Saga (aka Mississauga), Lizzie has never liked the way she looks - even though her best friend, Mel, says she's the pretty one. She starts dating guys online, but she's afraid to send pictures, even when her skinny friend, China, does her makeup: She knows no one would want her if they could really see her. So she starts to lose weight. With punishing drive, she counts almonds consumed, miles logged, pounds dropped. She fights her way into coveted dresses.

The Bookshop on the Corner

Nina Redmond is a librarian with a gift for finding the perfect books for her readers. But can she write her own happy ever after? In this valentine to readers, librarians, and book lovers the world over, the New York Times best-selling author of Little Beach Street Bakery returns with a funny, moving new novel for fans of Meg Donohue, Sophie Kinsella, and Nina George's The Little Paris Bookshop.

Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

From the best-selling author of Help, Thanks, Wow comes an honest, funny book about how to make sense of life's chaos. What do we do when life lurches out of balance? How can we reconnect to one other and to what's truly important when evil and catastrophe seem inescapable? These questions lie at the heart of Stitches, Anne Lamott's captivating follow-up to her New York Times best-selling Help, Thanks, Wow. In this book, Lamott explores how and where we find meaning in our modern, frantic age.

Dept. of Speculation

"The Wife" once exchanged love letters with her husband, coyly postmarked the Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes -the arrival of a child and, later, a lover - the Wife puzzles over the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and romantic love.

Britt-Marie Was Here: A Novel

Britt-Marie can't stand mess. She eats dinner at precisely the right time and starts her day at six in the morning because only lunatics wake up later than that. And she is not passive-aggressive. Not in the least. It's just that sometimes people interpret her helpful suggestions as criticisms, which is certainly not her intention. But at 63, Britt-Marie has had enough. She finally walks out on her loveless 40-year marriage and finds a job in the only place she can: Borg, a small, derelict town devastated by the financial crisis.

The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend

It all began with a correspondence between two quite different women: 28-year-old Sara from Haninge, Sweden, and 65-year-old Amy from the small town of Broken Wheel, Iowa. After years of exchanging books, letters and thoughts on the meaning of literature and life, Sara, mousy, disheveled, who has never been anywhere in her life - has really lived only for her work in a beloved bookshop, which has just closed its doors for the last time - bravely decides to accept her unknown friend's invitation to visit.

Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

Hailed by Lena Dunham as an "essential (and hilarious) voice for women", Lindy West is ferociously witty and outspoken, tackling topics as varied as pop culture, social justice, and body image. Her empowering work has garnered a coast-to-coast audience that eagerly awaits Shrill, her highly anticipated literary debut.

Travels with Charley in Search of America

In September 1960, John Steinbeck and his poodle, Charley, embarked on a journey across America, from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases. Travels with Charley is animated by Steinbeck’s attention to the specific details of the natural world and his sense of how the lives of people are intimately connected to the rhythms of nature—to weather, geography, the cycles of the seasons. His keen ear for the transactions among people is evident, too, as he records the interests and obsessions that preoccupy the Americans he encounters along the way.

My Life on the Road

Gloria Steinem - writer, activist, organizer, and one of the most inspiring leaders in the world - now tells a story she has never told before, a candid account of how her early years led her to live an on-the-road kind of life, traveling, listening to people, learning, and creating change. She reveals the story of her own growth in tandem with the growth of an ongoing movement for equality. This is the story at the heart of My Life on the Road.

The Art of Memoir

Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers' experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr's own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told - and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.)

Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story

New York Times best-selling poet and multiplatinum singer-songwriter Jewel explores her unconventional upbringing and extraordinary life in an inspirational memoir that covers her childhood, rise to fame, marriage, and motherhood. She writes beautifully about growing up amid the natural wonders of Alaska, about pain and childhood trauma, and about discovering her own identity years after the entire world had discovered the beauty of her songs.

Publisher's Summary

That the greatly admired novelist Kate Christensen has turned to the memoir form after six novels makes this book an event. Readers of memoirs of high literary quality, particularly those with food themes - most conspicuously Ruth Reichl's Comfort Me with Apples and Gabrielle Hamilton's Blood, Bones, and Butter - as well as admirers of M. F. K. Fisher and Laurie Colwin will be a large and eager audience.

This memoir derives from Kate's popular foodcentric blog, in which she shares scenes from an unusual upbringing and an unusually happy present-day life, providing an audience for this book that is already primed. That it is written by Kate Christensen means it will be a delicious reading experience in every sense - a compulsively listenable account of a knockabout life, full of sorrows and pleasures, many of the latter of the sensual, appetitive variety.

What the Critics Say

"I’ve often thought that eating, writing and living well required similar qualities: creativity, daring, the ability to savor the good stuff and learn from the bad. Blue Plate Special is the memoir of an utterly original thinker, a free-spirited gourmand, and a great American writer. It’s an expert guide on inspiration, ingenuity, heartbreak, buoyancy, home, love, family, screwing up, bouncing back, and perfecting the bacon-cheddar biscuit." (Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl, Dark Places, and Sharp Objects)

"Blue Plate Special is the evocative, irresistible tale of the life and loves of one of America’s greatest writers, Kate Christensen. Her loves include: Family, friends, men, travel, literature, but perhaps most of all, food. This is a breathtaking book, sensuously written, emotionally generous, and decadent as a bowl of macaroni and cheese." (Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins)

I grabbed this book as soon as I heard an interview with the author on NPR. Based on that, I wanted to read anything by Kate Christenson and thus I was expecting a much more introspective exploration of her life. What I got instead was an extended list of unexamined life experiences, rendered factually and sounding totally banal by the narrator's sing-song-y voice. Every event, situation, item in the physical environment was made to seem oh-so "precious", with unnecessary detail which after a few chapters became just tiresome. Perhaps in the hands of a less chirpy narrator, this book would have more heft and substance. But performed as is, "Blue Plate Special" is the new "Eat Pray Love", with the same shallow, self-referential descriptions that make it a picaresque pseudo-adventure for the privileged.

Actually, the "I", Kate, the narrator of this memoir is not nearly as interesting as her mother, with her multiple marriages, breakdowns, struggles and angst, and the listener only gets a random flash of her as background noise. Sometimes I kept reading just for the purpose of finding out more of what was going on with the mom in the story.

I can't say that this book is ruined by the narrator (although for me it was), or simply that IMO Tavia Gilbert's birdsong reading gives a shallow rendering to what might be an interesting life. Might read better in print.

I'll give it a "3", though, because it satisfies one of my basic standards of read-worthiness: it's entertaining.

What made the experience of listening to Blue Plate Special the most enjoyable?

Kate Christensen has a lot of unique experiences growing up in various parts of the country (under various conditions) and later Europe, with unusual parents and extended family. She has a front row seat for some pretty exceptional experiences: living in France, the Iowa Writer's Workshop and working in NYC in the late nineties while living in pre-gentrified Williamsburg. Her voice is genuine and charming and I couldn't stop thinking about her when I wasn't listening.The only distraction is the narrator's voice, which has an affected, overly-respiratory breathiness that reminded me of an "I can't Believe it's Not Butter" commercial. You can get past it though, easy. Just would have been cooler if she'd read it herself. Reminded me lots of Blood, Bones and Butter.